Letter: New reality is hotter

Regardless of what one chooses to believe about climate change, this past July was Lubbock’s hottest ever. Was for about 1/3 of our State (see the A-J’s article). Just shy of five years ago, I began deploying Raspberry Pi’s for precision irrigation. At that time heat sinks for the processers on Pi’s were for the mental comfort of the owner. Over the first few years as temperatures just kept going up, I had to retrofit heat sinks on Pi’s. This July, I had to retrofit cooling fans. With hotter weather, the Pi’s were hitting 185 F and shutting down. Both Google and Oracle had datacenters shutdown in Britain due to hotter weather. There will be a lot of cooling retrofitting going on in the computer industry. New design standards for buildings with data centers will surely be forth coming. If warming weather continues as fast as it has, there may not be enough time, supplies, people, and information to keep up. Choose to believe climate change or not, the current new reality is hotter. I hope we all can keep up with retrofit and adaptation.

David McGaughey/Wolfforth

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Letter to the editor climate change and the hotter new reality